Refinished Tu 6/7/22
This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I first finished on Easter Sunday 4/20/03. I was off Th/Fr/Sa/Su and I mostly read in one marathon over that weekend... "Great read. I never wanted it to end".
I refinished it We 4/5/17 and according to the note on the flyleaf this was also the day that I bought the new PC from BLH and a new 32" monitor that I use downstairs.
The novel is about Lily White who is a Long Island criminal defense attorney. Most of the novel is about her family and her in-laws. Her parents are 'nouveau riche' and her father made his wealth from the family owned fur store. Lily had always been in love with the boy 'up the hill'. His parents were 'old money' but actually they were very poor but retained their 'class'. Norman Torkelson is a con artist who specializes in fleecing rich lonely women and this is the criminal case that is examined during the novel. An old woman is murdered and you don't know if Norman did the murder or was it his beautiful girlfriend who was jealous of all of Norman's 'marks'.
From the novels page at GoodReads:
"In Susan Isaac's most ambitious and dazzling novel to date, we are introduced to Lee White, a criminal defense lawyer practicing on Long Island. Into her life drifts Norman Torkelson, a career con man charged with strangling to death his latest mark. At first, as Lee explains to us, the case seems routine, the evidence overwhelming. Norman--manly, magnetic and morally reprehensible--is a man who crisscrosses America looking for patsies for his cruel marriage scam: Love 'em, liquidate their assets, leave 'em. Clearly, he murdered Bobette Frisch, the dumpy, sour 50-something bar owner who had fallen madly in love with him. But just as Lee is resigning herself to the inevitable Guilty! verdict, she begins to have doubts. What, after all, was Norman's motive? Why not do what he had done for the last 20 years: run and leave behind a broke and brokenhearted victim? Lee starts to wonder if her client is not only not guilty but also covering for the real killer and, in doing so, performing the first selfless act of his life. As the Torkelson case unfolds, a second narrator chimes in to tell us the story behind the story: the tale of Lee's life. Born Lily White, Lee is a smart, pretty and privileged child coming of age on Long Island. Her parents have little time for her or her younger sister, devoted as they are to the pursuit of shallowness. Her mother, Sylvia, who looks like Lauren Bacall's twin sister with a mild eating disorder, is busy with the exhausting work of keeping up her wardrobe. Her father, Leonard Weissberg--Weiss--and finally White, is consumed by his chi-chi Manhattan fur salon, his model-bookkeeper mistress, and his obsession with the family next door, the old-money, oh-so-social Taylors. When Lee marries Jazz Taylor, the scion of these blue-bloods, her life seems blessed. Suddenly she has her mother's approval, her father's love--and a sublime husband. No matter that she has to give up her dream job in the Manhattan DA's Office to move back to Long Island with him; that's what marriage is, a series of compromises made in the name of love. Isn't it? Lily White masterfully interweaves the depths of deception surrounding the twisted Torkelson case with the stunning betrayals that devastate Lee's own life. With the characteristic intelligence and delicious, razor-sharp wit displayed in her previous bestsellers, such as After All These Years and Compromising Positions, Susan Isaacs has crafted an extraordinary novel about social mobility -- about what is phony and what is real. Lily White is the seamlessly executed story of the crimes committed in the name of the good life and the victims of these violations: Those like Bobette, who do not survive, those whose spirits are crushed, and the few, like Lee, who fight back--and find something better".
I loved the book the third time through and I want to get more books by the author. I read her bio and she is actually a housewife who had a lawyer for a husband and she just started writing on a lark.
Today is the library book sale (Sa 6/11/22) and I might check out the stacks for a novel by her after I buy books at the sale.
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